The second session of Changing The World was about technology. But I found the message was a bit split. The director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner spoke about how open source and community enabled Netscape to evolve and improve to become Firefox.
Don Lindsay, the designer of Mac OS X spoke how he designed an “iPhone” in the early 90s, but the technology was not there to allow it to change the world. He then went on to give another example of when design and technology were able to work together, producing the Microsoft project Photosynth which you can use to make a 3d map out of a bunch of photographs.
Anand Agarawala, another TED speaker showed off his product, BumpTop which is a 3D desktop replacement running off the Unreal physics engine. BumpTop started off as a Master’s thesis “across the street” and his message was that you to can be like him (as he showed picture of himself on the Google campus/5 ft away from Bill Clinton/etc).
The last speaker of the session was Roel Vertegaal who leads the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University. He showed a bunch of up and coming technologies such as organic LEDs, digital ink and claytronics.
I think this session lacked focus. It showed us some cool tools for the present, and the future; some of which may change the world, but the practical uses of some in changing the world are not evident.
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